The skies above LUX-SEVEN churned with iridescent storm bands, as if the heavens themselves felt the gravity of what had been awakened. Thunder cracked like shattering glass, illuminating the mirrored towers below with brief flashes of spectral white. From the highest suite in the Skyvault Spire, Elias Vayne stood before a panoramic display wall—an interactive sheet of liquid crystal that showed the city not as it was, but as it had once been.
The ancient version of LUX-SEVEN flickered across the glass: cobblestone-like skybridges, lower-hung towers shaped like bellflowers, neon calligraphy of the first settlers. Elias stared in silence.
He wore a midnight-blue longcoat over a deep maroon tunic, its collar studded with micro-reactive nodes. His black gloves clicked softly against the haptic console as he manipulated the city's timeline projections. His eyes, sharp and distant, moved quickly.
Behind him, Mireille entered the room, the click of her boots muffled on the obsidian glass floor. She was dressed in a fitted black travel suit with asymmetric cuts, hints of silver at the seams. Her hair was braided back tightly, ready for what came next.
"You didn't sleep," she said, placing a thermal canister on the nearby counter. The smell of roasted kava fruit and powdered mint instantly lifted the room's clinical chill.
"I can't afford to sleep. Not now."
She moved beside him. On the wall, LUX-SEVEN's holographic twin rotated. "The prism did something to you. Are you sure you're—"
"No. I'm not sure about anything anymore. But Valen left this path. And if there's even a chance these artifacts are keeping the Riftborn sealed, we follow it."
Mireille nodded, but her eyes lingered on his profile a moment longer than usual.
Hours later, their destination came into focus: the Timewell Bastion.
An ancient construct buried inside the crust of a fractured moon—Epsilon L-9—a place erased from modern maps. Valen's coordinates pointed them there, alongside a cryptic line:
Time doesn't forget. But it can be made to forgive.
The journey aboard Elias's stealth corvette—Oblivion's Wake—was smooth but tense. Every corridor in the ship echoed like a cathedral. Their crew consisted of only three: Elias, Mireille, and the newly awakened onboard consciousness, KAIROS-7, a hybrid intelligence partially reconstructed from Valen's neural signature.
The ship smelled faintly of cold metal and wild myrrh—Mireille's doing. She had set up diffusers to mask the sterility.
When they arrived, Epsilon L-9 hung in space like a scarred pearl. Jagged mountain ridges rose from its dusty surface, half-lit by a dying satellite sun.
They descended in silence.
The Timewell Bastion was older than any Terran record. Pillars of ivory crystal spiraled from the ground like trees. A dry wind pushed through hollow chasms, carrying the scent of scorched minerals and ancient ozone.
Elias moved ahead, his boots crunching across fractured obsidian. The architecture here was angular, carved in the geometric language of an extinct civilization. But the prism—now embedded in his chestplate—glowed faintly in response to the environment.
Mireille ran her fingers along the walls. "These glyphs... they're similar to the ones from Vault Ceros. But older. Much older."
In the central chamber, they found it: a suspended relic, crystalline and fluid at once, floating above a dais of gravity-locked stone. It pulsed like a heartbeat. Beneath it, a sarcophagus of pale glass.
KAIROS-7's voice whispered through their comms: Riftcore Signature detected. This is Fragment Three.
Elias approached.
As his hand neared the relic, a shockwave burst through the chamber. The walls flared with images—a burning planet, a winged colossus tearing through dimensions, Valen screaming beneath a fractured sky.
And then... stillness.
The relic dissolved into Elias's armor, melting into the prism embedded in his chest. New glyphs etched across the suit's surface.
Elias staggered, catching his breath.
Mireille steadied him. "What did you see?"
He turned toward her, eyes brighter than before.
"The Riftborn are waking. And they're inside the folds of time itself. They don't just exist in one place—they echo. And this artifact didn't seal them. It... tethered them. Delayed them."
Mireille's expression tightened. "So what happens when all seven fragments merge?"
Elias looked toward the cracked moon's sky, where the stars trembled faintly.
"Either we contain the echo, or we become it."
Back on LUX-SEVEN, Zaire Garel stood before a thousand drones, all projecting Elias's latest appearance inside the Bastion.
His smile was thin.
"Let the councils see. Let them fear. We'll show them the cost of shadows."
He turned to a woman behind him—silver-eyed, robed in lattice silk.
"Prepare the Iron Parliament. And awaken the Vaultborn. The Vaynes were never meant to finish this war. We were."
As the Oblivion's Wake departed the fractured moon, Elias stood alone in the viewing bay.
Mireille entered quietly, holding two cups of warm synth-root tea.
He accepted one without looking.
"You still think you're alone in this?" she asked.
Elias finally turned to her, and for a moment, something unspoken passed between them—a flicker of connection, unclaimed but undeniable.
"No," he said softly. "Not anymore."
Outside, stars warped around them.